WASHINGTON {AP} Parents may have a way to budge their chip-chomping, TV-watching kids from the family sofa: a bicycle hooked up electrically to the set. To see their favorite shows, couch potatoes have to pedal.

As bizarre as it sounds, growing scientific evidence points to a common virus as a potential cause of at least a small percentage of human obesity. While the research has mostly been in animals, preliminary results from human studies appear to support the animal findings.

WASHINGTON {AP} Parents may have a way to budge their chip-chomping, TV-watching kids from the family sofa: a bicycle hooked up electrically to the set. To see their favorite shows, couch potatoes have to pedal.

...customers for such a device. So would spouses of couch potatoes. Obesity researcher David Allison of St. Luke's-RooseveltHospitalinNewYork experimented with "TVcyles" and a small number of obese children. Some of the children had to peddle...